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Sunday, December 7, 2014

Since I am doing C-41, and after many experiments, I adopted Dignan's 2-bath developer as the most practical and cheap method to get acceptable negatives. I had to fight 2 main enemies, the surge marks and grain. The surge marks were defeated by adopting the right agitation of the tank. This consists in inclining the tank and turning it very slowly some 5 times per minute during the second bath. The first bath is not important, just stir to ensure that the CD4 soaks the film, a pre-soak in water may help.

Below you may find 3 photos free from surge marks but still with huge grains.

To fight the grain, which is increased by scanning , I decided to follow Dignan's original recipe, using Potassium Carbonate in the second bath instead of just Sodium Carbonate and 1g/liter of Potassium Bromide. The Potassium Bromide will affect very much the developing time that must be increased. Because a small difference in Potassium Bromide weight will cause a big difference in developing time, I extend the 2.nd bath to 30 minutes and also because the 2-bath developer cann't overdevelop. The result can be appreciated in the next 3 photos where I used the same 2.nd bath with addition of 1g/liter of Potassium Bromide.

Monday, December 1, 2014

Because Caffenol is a one shot developer, I use minimal amounts of stuff in order to make it cheap enough. I have been changing the coffee brand and the original recipe that uses only coffee and soda may produce more or less fog, depending on film and coffee brand. So, I started using Sodium Chloride (table salt) as anti-foggant. First only 2g/liter and then 4g/liter. Because salt is a restrainer, the developing time had to be increased from 70 to 90 minutes at 20ºC.

The formula, for a 500ml batch is now as follows:

150 ml water

10g Soluble, not decaf. robusta coffee

3 g Sodium Carbonate (or 300ml of a 1% solution)

2 g Sodium Chloride (or 20ml of a 10% solution)

Water to make 500 ml

Develop for 90 minutes at 20ºC

Here some photos I made recently using Agfaphoto APX 100 (may be like Ilford FP4), exposed in a Cosina plastic body with a Vivitar 50mm/1.7 lens. The iris of this lens are broken, it is always full openned and I used speeds from 1/500 to 1/2000s according to light conditions.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

It is unbelievable how good a point and shoot film camera is! Some days ago I decided to take one, a Canon Prima Super 135N, 38-135mm, f:3.5-8.9, for a trip to the village of Nazaré. I didn't know it was a camera with date printing, I didn't set it to the actual date. But this means that the camera is more than 20 years old, the date is from 1992.

Sometimes I ask myself if it makes sense to go with a heavy apparatus that takes photos of almost the same quality of a light, full automatic and with built in flash unit that costs about 1 euro at ebay. The only disadvantage is the need of CR2 batteries that are consumed in short time and, if you don't use the camera so often, they will discharge and when you need the camera you have no battery...

Sunday, November 9, 2014

After my experiments with Parodinal and C-41 films, I decided to expose a color negative film and develop it with the 2-bath Dignan's developer. I normaly don't use temperature but this time I used a warm second bath, I wanted to see the resulting changes. Not only that but I also forgot washing between the second bath and the bleach bath. Further I used Povidone Iodine as bleach and I left the film 2 hours in it. After bleaching I fixed with Ammonium Thiosulfate.

After all these changes in the process, now I don't know what was the main cause for these pictures:

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The caffenol recipe I suggested to Digitaltruth Photo is very sensitive to Sodium Carbonate amount and coffee quality. I started then by adding some table salt to prevent fog and it works. The addition of salt must be compensated with an increase in development time because salt retards the development. For 2g/Liter of salt an increase of 10 minutes is enough and for 4g/Liter a further increase of 10 minutes should work. So, instead of 60 minutes, 70 or 80 minutes (or more) for 2 and 4 g/Liter respectively should be considered.
My last roll was developed with 4g/Liter salt but the development last only 75 minutes and it is a little underdeveloped, dark shadows without details. Next time I will develop for full 90 minutes with 4g/Liter salt. Just to see if it is too much, or not.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Now that I know that the developer parodinal does give very faint colors when used to develop C-41 films, I decided to make a parodinal containing more Acetaminophen than usual to be used as a multipurpose developer. I exposed today a Kodacolor 200 roll and I developed it in this new parodinal in dilution 1:25 at about 40ºC for 7 minutes.

I was positively surprised with the results. It is not color in the common sense it is something between color and sepia. Not an alternative to C-41, but a new photographic approach for hobbyists.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The latest news on my multipurpose developer Colordinal, whose final formula is still not established what I hope will be soon. By now, B&W development follows Rodinal rules in what times, temperatures and agitation is concerned, I don't recommend stand development, it gives uneven development, the bottom will be overdeveloped. For color C-41 films it works but could be better and I am considering some changes in the formula but first I have to see what the formula of the last batch is capable, adjusting temperatures and times. At the first C-41 roll I developed in Colordinal I used room temperature and the same dilution 1:100 and time as for B&W. Low color saturation but development was complete. At the second roll I rose the temperature to 40 (or above) and used higher concentration, 1:25 and some 15min time. Very dense but more color saturation. At the third and last roll I used the same concentrated solution, less temperature, 30ºC, and less developing time, only 10min. Yes, it was the best result I had until now, but not the last word. The temperature is OK and the developing time can be still shorter than 10 minutes, maybe just 5 minutes and this will be the next experiment. Or perhaps time and temperature could be the same as for normal C-41 process, 3:15 minutes at 38,5ºC or something closer to that.

And here some of the latest Colordinal pictures, took with Kodacolor 200 at 1 f stop overexposed.

Green and Blue are well represented but Red is missing to balance the pictures. And, on the other hand all pictures had to be adjusted at scanning to give better colors that, without any adjustments seem dull and violet like the first picture below. The second was obtained with automatic level correction of the first one in Photoscape.

One may think that it is still a long way to produce better color results but the picture without color correction given above is already a big progress when compared to the pictures of the first roll.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Colordinal is the name I gave to the multipurpose developer I made, based on a parodinal recipe in my own variation. See recipe of the parodinal alone here, third alternative.
The first color roll, reported in the previous post, was developed at dilution 1:100 for 1 hour in stand development at room temperature. Because the colors needed more saturation, I used the same developer batch at 1:25 and developed a second roll in 13 minutes in semi-stand development at room temperature. More color, but still needs something else. The film has a greenish base color, what produces magenta shifted prints. To get more acceptable prints, one needs to correct this at scanning or with post-treatment or both like I did.

I developed a third roll today that looks better than this second one but it is still in water for final wash. I will scan it tomorrow. Keep tuned with this blog.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Having as background that Parodinal (or Rodinal) is a weak color developer, I had the idea of giving it a push with the right color developing agent CD4. I replaced a part of the para-acetylaminophenol, aka Paracetamol or Thylenol, in parodinal with CD4 in order to make a multipurpose developer for both color (C-41) and B&W.

The results are until now very promising. I developed a color roll in dilution 1:100 for one hour and the same with a B&W film. See pictures below:

In this dilution, 1:100 it is a good B&W developer. The C-41 film gave unsaturated colors and a shift to magenta. I will try to make it better. I didn't use temperature, I developed at room temperature, and the dilution is for color perahps too weak.

Monday, October 6, 2014

First I only intended to develop C-41 as B&W, using homebrewed Parodinal as B&W developer. The idea was to develop in a normal B&W workflow and finaly to clear the film with an incomplete bleach bath of Povidone Iodine or normal diluted EDTA bleach. I obtained pictures like Pic. 1 when scanned as color film. I started thinking that maybe Parodinal could give color. So, and because I assumed that Paracetamol was a color developer, I used as next a more concentrated solution and temperature of about 40ºC at the development. This time I had pictures like Pic. 2, where I could see clearly some real color.

If a more concentrated developer and temperature brings more color, next time I used 1:5 concentration and temperature and bleach to clear the film base, leaving some silver in order to allow scanning. In fact the amount of dye is not enough to make a complete bleach. I had this time images like Pic. 3. I could conclude that the sky was better than the more shadowed parts.

Next time I used the same film I have been using (Kodacolor 200) but I used it as a 25 ISO film to overexpose the film. And now I had pictures like Pic 4 and 5.

I think it is clear that the more concentrate and the more overexposed the better in order to push the color developed by Parodinal. But I must still leave silver on the film for better scanning. Next step is to prepare a new Parodinal, using more Acetaminophen than usual parodinal has. Insted of 20g, maybe 40g or 50.